I got an old laptop, A Dell Latitude CP, in good working order: 233MHz, 128MB memory, 6GB HD. I got a fresh copy of DSL 4.4 and burned a CD, loaded it, seemed ok. Went through the HD install process, ending with Lilo boot loader. Said init_module: no such device insmod char-major-10-134 failed "preparing for reboot..."then froze and I had to stop the machine by taking the battery out.

views 52, replies 0. Oh, well. I still think DSL is the way to go; I have a laptop in good working order and DSL has a long history so why is it so difficult? It was missing apm.o and this sounds as if it might be to do with power management. This was enabled in the BIOS so I disabled it and tried again. No change. I then tried dsl tohd=/dev/hda1but that got me a pale green screen that I couldn't read, which I think meant that the resolution was wrong. So I tried dsl tohd=/dev/hda1 fb=800x600with the same result. I was able to install DSL 3.3, which doesn't support the cardmgr and I need this for ethernet access to the net, but there was no nonsense about insmod apm.o so do I report it as a bug in DSL4.4?

Everything ok now. I tried DSL-N, installed to /dev/hda1 and when it asked me to install a boot loader I hit 'y' rather than ENTER and this gave me a choice of Grub or Lilo. I chose Lilo and got a useful installation. The only drawback was I couldn't read the usb port. It said "/dev/sda1 is not a valid block data device". I looked at Linux Questions and found a post from mkenyon2 sayihg that he had a solution to the prooblem; he ran sudo modprobe usb_storageafter which he could mount the pen drive with mount -tvfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1so that is ok. I am a little curious to know why DSL wouldn't install but less so than formerly.